All you need is two paddles, a ball and a table. That’s it. Let the fun begin! Table Tennis is a great way to get you moving. I know what I am talking about. I started playing table tennis when I was fifteen.

Soon thereafter I joined my first club and I’ve been playing ever since. My current rating is about 2150 and I am registered at USATT.

By now you must have noticed, that I am not talking about ping-pong but ‘table-tennis’. Because there is in fact a difference, even though they are both based on the same concept. Check out Youtube for instance and punch in the term ‘table tennis’ – you will get tons of links to videos where professional players are competing with each other. And I am sure you will notice a difference to what people commonly refer to as ping-pong.

If you didn’t focus too hard on the ball, but rather the footwork, you will have noticed that playing table-tennis seriously requires you to move around a lot and quickly. That little ball can pick up speeds up to 100 mph and believe me, that is FAST.

And that’s the difference between ping-pong and table-tennis. The good news is: you can start at any age to turn this fun sport into a serious work-out regime. You will have to take it easy though, especially in the beginning.

Okay, to get you started, try the following with your partner: 20 shots without any miss-hits back and forth. Focus on consistency, try to avoid mistakes. Pros and advanced hobby players do the exact same thing, however, just more like a 100 shots and obviously at a much higher frequency, in order to get warmed up before a match.

And that’s it. As I said, everybody follows the same warm-up routine. But in order to get there, hitting the ball at that pace without making any mistakes, it requires a lot of regular practice. Ideally, every day for a few hours. But anyway, everybody has to start slowly, there’s no way around. Try to do 20 hits in a row with your partner, that’s your first milestone before you move on to the next step.

Forget about the speed. Do as slowly as you can, but with the best possible precision. Speed comes automatically as you get more consistent and confident. Once you can do 20 times, step it up to 50 times. That will take you some time to get there and that’s normal. And then the next milestone would be a hundred times. I will talk about exercise variations a little later to give you some ideas.

So that’s it for now. Try it out, give it a shot. Indoor table-tennis is a perfect example of a cool sport that combines fun and serious work-out exercises at the same time.

Tony Ulrich writes articles about how to Workout with Table Tennis as fun and healthy activity and features a mini-series about Table Tennis Service Rules on his website.

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